Hiroshi was Wendy’s first Oriental.
Wendy was, by her own standards, a happy, healthy girl. She was off seeing the world, between high school and college. Skiing. Sailing. Hiking. Museuming. A taste of this, a nibble of that, a swallow of the other—an Austrian, a Brit, an Italian. Just as at home she’d sampled a jock, a nerd, an older man, a druggie. She told Hiroshi her party stories because they excited him. The idea of seven American high school girls, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old, high and drunk and sloppy, playing strip poker, playing with boys drove her fifty-year-old rich Japanese lover insane. He would manipulate her with hand and tongue and Hitachi vibrator—$56, ÖS650, ¥7,168—letting her reach her orgasm limit before he would jump on top of her for his own release. It was true that he took a longish time at that also, but it wasn’t unpleasant, and when he caught his breath he would always take her to Palmer’s, that marvelous and ubiquitous Austrian chain of lingerie stores, and buy her a little something. Every time she told him one of her party stories.
Wendy found herself in a bit of a quandary. It was true that she was in the relationship for the fun of it. And the novelty. At least to start with. That, she felt, was healthy. Her friends and her parents would have felt the same. But now she wanted a Burton board, basically a surfboard modified for snow, and as the T-shirts say, snow is just frozen water. She skied faster, if not better, than Hiroshi, and only stayed behind him because he sulked so severely when she didn’t. And Hiroshi mostly liked the groomed blue runs because he looked so slick on them. In the bumps she could really blow him off. Wendy was a shredder—snow flew when she skied the bumps. She had happy feet. Plus teenage knees. So here she was, thinking about what element she would have to add to her next party story—a black basketball player of mythic proportions, the girl who pulled a train for the varsity football team, an all-girl five-girl daisy chain, tabs of acid and hallucinogenic bosoms—in order to score the Burton board, almost $1,000, ¥142,000, ÖS11,600, with import duties and resort prices.
Somewhere beneath those thoughts, unarticulated and not yet realized, but caused by those thoughts, Wendy had decided to break off with Hiroshi.
The decision was made instinctively, instantly, from the gut of her integrity. It had happened the moment she saw herself contemplating an exchange of sexual favors for cash or cash equivalent. Wendy was not one to delude herself that the difference between cash and cash equivalent changed the sexual favors equation. Her father was a tax accountant, and if cash equivalent was taxable, then it was real income, and if it was real income, then fucking for a piece of ski equipment made her a real whore.
Yet in a way she was richer than Hiroshi. Wendy had a gift for real pleasure, a sensuous delight in shopping and spending and having and consuming. For Hiroshi, all of these, earning, buying, owning, even gift giving, were just ways of keeping score.
Hans skied in front of them.
That was okay with Hiroshi. Not because Hans was another man but because Hans was hired help. He was their guide. Hiroshi paid the Arlberg Ski School, the most famous one in the world, the one that started it all, ÖS1,650 ($142) a day for him. Hans was highly trained. He had passed several difficult exams administered by the Austrian government and was entitled to wear the patch with the Austrian Eagle on it that said Staatlich Geprufter Skilehrer, state certified ski teacher, a serious title in a country in which skiing is universal. In addition, he was a Skiführer, which meant that he had passed another series of exams and was qualified in this land of avalanches, cliffs, and sudden storms to take tourists off-piste, away from the marked trails. Even with 135 kilometers of trails and 70 lifts, skiing the pistes was definitely not chic. Chic was the search for unmarked snow, fresh snow, your own snow, where you could make powder tracks. Chic was the frisson of danger—the more it cost the tastier it was—and that’s the way Charles and Di did it and Andy and Fergie did it when they skied over the border at Klosters in Switzerland.
Hans was twenty-eight. He was a mountain boy, his horizons limited not by the peaks that hemmed in the valley, but by the narrow minds and the traditionalist society that surrounded him. Sons of farmers became farmers and something supplemental because when farmland is vertical and a big herd of cattle is eight cows, farming doesn’t go very far. Shopkeepers inherited shops. Civil servants raised their Kinder civilly. The doctor’s father had been a doctor and, by God, both generations cherished their titles and wore them like badges.
Sometimes a mountain boy had magic in his feet and steel in his thighs, a fondness for pain and total lack of fear. Then he raced. He’d start racing when he could walk. It got serious at puberty. If he had a real shot at making the national team all Österreich knew it by the time he was fourteen. Most people have only seen a downhill race on television. They don’t know it at all. The course must be seen in person and, even better, walked on or skied. If the snow is soft like snow, they pour water on it the night before the race so the course will be frozen. It will be ice. The sound of the edges of a racer’s skis is like the sound of a train. They howl and clatter. When the racer loses an edge or catches an edge or misses his prejump or his feet can’t move with a rippling series of ridges or he’s just not strong enough or prepared enough to brave enough, then he’s gone. A wild tumbling thing. Skis and poles scattered. Down the course. A body banging on a skittering cliff of ice searching for a soft obstruction to stop on before it meets a hard one and breaks. Stand next to the course. Watch them come. They come like race cars. All racers have broken bones, torn cartilage, reattached ligaments.
There are fewer skiers on the World Cup Tour than there are basketball players in the NBA or baseball players that make it to the major leagues.
So he charges down the hill, hell-bent for leather, to that moment of realization that he doesn’t have the guts, or the commitment, or the skill, or the body, or the reflexes, or the eyes, or the right coach, the right diet, the right season, the right stars—something—and he will have to settle for humbler employment. If he still likes skiing and can say, “Weight on the outside ski” in another language, he can take the local exams and become a landesskilehrer, local ski instructor, more exams and try for his Eagle, other exams and become a guide. Each ski area has its own school, or schools, and its own way of doing business. The Arlberg Ski School is owned by a core group of the instructors, with shares divided in ways as mysterious and arcane as a medieval guild. An instructor’s share depends on where he lives, how long he’s been a member, what he teaches, and how much he works. He doesn’t work if the customers don’t like him. Like any other service person he counts on the same clients coming back year after year—and they do, asking for Kurt, or Rudi, or Luis, or Hans. When he works, an instructor makes about $500 a week. Which is not bad, but is not enough. So he has deals with the restaurant where he takes the class for lunch, with the bistro where he takes the class for après drinks, with the ski shop that he sends them to for outfits, and when he passes the shrines that dot the Catholic mountainsides, he says a brief prayer for a big tip.
Hans had grown up hard and narrow. Vision came to him in bits and flashes, denied almost as fast as he’d seen it. Perhaps he was bright, but he was taught that nothing would come from learning. He had some talent for skiing, but his father said it was for children and that Hans would have to learn that life was hard in the mountains and he would have to work, not play. He skied anyway, but came to racing late. All he ever broke was his left arm. He got back on skis when he was healed, as all the machismo in Tyrolia said he must, but a month after he returned he flew off a downhill course and caught a glimpse of the afterlife while he was airborne. He liked a little money. He liked how skiing kept his body hard, his face tan, his hair bleached, and how the girls liked that. He liked to get bier and schnapps and whatever drugs the tourists wanted to share and he liked to get laid. It was better than chipping ice off of cables before dawn in February or lifting boxes out of a delivery truck. Besides, he was a natural blond. Not something to wa
ste.
The clouds broke at last. The sky opened, immensely blue, bluer than it ever got in the lowlands. The sun came from above; it hit snow and bounced back up. It was a number 10 sun block day. Wendy already had a stripe of fluorescent pink sun block on her nose. On her it looked cute and California. Hiroshi used Piz Buin. Hans skied easily, but not with precision. Then Hiroshi, more precise, but stiffer. Then Wendy, loose and looking for fun.
The Valuga is the mountain that towers over St. Anton. It can be reached by a series of three cable cars. The last a small one that goes to the very top, primarily for the view, because there is no way to ski down. There is, however, a way to walk around to the back of the Valuga holding on to a cable with one hand while you carry your skis over your shoulder with the other. From there you can ski all the way down to Lech.
Hans led the way. It wasn’t that dangerous, there was something to hold on to. But it was still a thrill, an adrenaline tingle, because if the worst did happen, and you tripped, just when you were reaching for the next handhold, and you missed with your hand and didn’t have the reflexes to grab something else, and you had the bad luck to be in a really bad spot, you were dead. In the literal sense of dead.
It had been a terrible year. The worst year for snow in living memory. Then, on February 10, it had begun to snow. It snowed for two days. And everyone felt their knees begin to twitch like teenagers on Saturday night. Snow, snow, thank God Almighty, snow at last. Then, at least in the valley, it rained for two days. Steady. Unceasingly. Over in France, in the Savoie, there were floods and death. Then it snowed again, for a day, and another, and another. Over in France, in the Savoie, more died in avalanches. In St. Anton and the rest of the Arlberg, and the Vorarlberg, the western tip of Austria, the high peaks were kept closed. All day long you could hear muffled blasts as the dynamitards set charges to knock down the loose snow and sometimes the rumbling thunder when a mountainside of snow avalanched down.
There had only been three days of super skiing all season. Now, even though this week-long dump of snow on top of nothing was going to be very dangerous, everyone waited, with baited breath, for the big snowfields up above the tree line to be opened. It took three days. Three days later there were tracks everywhere. Except on the back of the Valuga.
Now the last lift was finally open. They walked around, looking out onto the jagged vastness. All three of them filled with a kind of lust.
Powder.
Hans laid down a perfect trail of perfect curves in a perfect virgin snowscape. Here, high up, it was more than deep snow—it was deep and dry and light. Real powder. And that is what skiing is really all about. Next to it all other skiing is practice, or a technical event like racing, or simply what we settle for while we wait for the real thing to come along. Hiroshi, then Wendy each in turn laid down a parallel track. Hiroshi was precise. He tried to make his turns as perfect as his powder suit by S.O.S., made in Sweden, $1800, KR12,075, ¥230,400, very hot colors and what the ski instructors in Val d’Isère were wearing this year. Wendy was ecstatic. She forgot about how she was going to break up with Hiroshi. She forgot about being tempted to be a whore. She forgot about what makes good girls into bad girls and how many pricks it takes to make a liberated woman into a slut. She forgot about going back to school and settling down and becoming an accountant so she wouldn’t have to be dependent on a man but could co-join with a co-equal to “progenitate” and become propertied as her parents had done but as was, the media said, beyond the reach of so many of this generation. She forgot about the holes in the earth’s atmosphere and the poison on the apples.
Powder.
Like a plunge into heaven. During the first two days of the storm it had been cold, about -10°C, about 0°F. Then, when it rained in the valley, it stayed below 0°C everywhere from the Galzig on up. Then the temperature dove—23°C, -10°F, and it kept on snowing. Which was magic. The colder the temperature, the lighter the snow. This was fluff, as fine as Colorado, as fine as the legendary high-desert powder of Alta in Utah. A skier who knows enough to let go of fear can drift down the face of cliff making his own cloud.
Wendy thought of Hiroshi as typically Japanese. Hiroshi did not. He thought of himself as an individualist. The typical Japanese was a member of the community first, of family, of company, of country, and an individual long afterward. Hiroshi was an adventurer. In his own mind he was a James Bond. Certainly he had that sense of ascendancy, the optimistic assurance that comes from the certainty of being racially superior that Bond had. It’s something that comes with empire, territorial or financial.
They were off by themselves in a travel brochure. The sky was azure. The sky was morning glory blue, larkspur blue, cerulean, cobalt, celeste. Three sets of S curves. The valley and the towns far, far below, past the tree line, invisible. Jagged cliffs and snow above.
The grade of the slope eased. Hans stopped. They all stopped. Wendy was grinning. A big bubble of happiness. A pause to share this one perfect run with each other. Hiroshi accepted the tribute. After all, it was his yen that had made this gathering, this perfection, possible. Hans accepted the silent accolades. After all, he had found this perfect patch of powder for them, virtually before anyone else. Which was his job.
There was a rumbling noise above them.
Neither Hiroshi nor Wendy paid any attention to it. They were catching their breath. Hans glanced up. Hans turned his skis down the hill, pushed with his poles, and took off. Then the other two glanced up.
There are scientific studies of avalanches. They will tell you that they occur on slopes over 35°. Depth hoar is one of the classical causes. Like the charming hoar frost that paints pumpkin fields for autumn postcards in New England, it is created by the crystalization of moisture from evaporation, hoar frost from dew, depth hoar from snow. These crystals have a cuplike shape and so fail to bond with the next layer of snow, leaving a layer of instability. The studies will speak of dry snow and wet snow. Dry snow avalanches usually occur during, or within several days after, snowfall. They may affect whole slopes even if wooded, and may exceed 100 miles per hour. Wet snow avalanches are slower. But the reality is that avalanches are at least as tricky as sex. They fail to happen when they should, then occur where they shouldn’t. Like the big slide at the eastern end of town that took out the Shell station and twelve people back in ’88. Or the one at the beginning of the ’90 season, near Stuben, with less than a meter of snow on the ground and not more than fifty meters from a very well skied piste. It swept over a twenty-two-year-old girl. Fifteen people watched. Everyone joined in to dig her out. It took less than twenty minutes to find her. By then she was dead.
It is possible to outski an avalanche. It’s been done on film. Charles, Prince of Wales, was almost caught in an avalanche while skiing off-piste in Klosters, Switzerland, in March of 1988. It buried one member of the prince’s party, Major Hugh Lindsay, and threw Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson 1,200 feet, breaking both her legs. No one establishes chic quicker than the British royals, and being avalanched has had a certain snob appeal ever since.
The rumbling got louder. No. Bigger. It was a rumble the size of a mountainside. Low and deep and huge.
The run to safety was less than a quarter mile. There was a ridge and a flat. A skier could turn to the left, over the ridge and down, while the slide would—most likely—take the path of least resistance to the right, hit the wide, slight slope of the meadow, and roll itself to a halt.
Hans put his skis straight and wide. He bent, went into a tuck, his poles under his arms, hands way out in front, the way he had been taught way back before he found out how tough racing really was. Hiroshi did his best, in his stiff, precise way, to imitate. Wendy first felt fear, then an immense exhilaration. She too got into a tuck. Hans had the weight and the longest skis. He began to pull away from them.
Now the powder, which had been their delight, was their enemy, slowing them down, holding them back, like a molasses trap.
Hiroshi was fine for the fi
rst two hundred yards. Then his thighs began to burn. The burn was exactly midpoint between the knee and the hip. There was a secondary pain just above the knees. He looked upon the pain as a test. One of discipline. Something to feel and to go through. But still it ached and robbed him of strength.
Wendy, looser and younger, leaning back on her heels, planed her skis higher, and passed Hiroshi. He would have hated her for it, but he was centered in his pain, being very Zen. Wendy had never felt such exhilaration. She was moving faster than she had ever gone. At some point in her acceleration she had gone beyond herself, moving faster than she knew how to ski, leaving fear behind. Lost luggage bounded on someone else’s plane.
Still, the avalanche was gaining.
Hiroshi’s left leg trembled. He wished to stand, to stretch it, relax the muscle. It trembled. He caught an edge on the snow beneath the snow. The snow held the ski, the binding released, as it was supposed to. Hiroshi thought, as he felt it come off, that he could continue to ski on just one ski. But that wasn’t true and it was only the hyperawareness of the moment that made it possible to have the thought, so very clearly, between the time he caught the edge and when he went tumbling. He lost both skis, then one pole. He rolled on his shoulder and head as he came to rest at the point where, one gasp later, the avalanche would roll over him, bury him, drown him.
Wendy was doing fine. Not as fast as the avalanche. Not even as fast as Hans, but fast enough so that in the convergence of time she would reach the ridge before the wall of snow behind her. The wall that had just covered her generous lover.
You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 39
